Guy Walters is the author of nine books, which include four wartime thrillers and the critically acclaimed histories Hunting Evil and Berlin Games. Frustrated at the enormous amount of junk history around, Guy sees it as his personal mission to wage war on ignorance and misconceptions about the past. Guy is currently working on a new history of the Great Escape, and is also studying for his PhD at Newcastle University. His website is www.guywalters.com and is @guywalters on Twitter.

James Bond, Ian Fleming and the Spy Who Didn't Love Him

In November, I blogged about the case of Dr Gilly Carr, the Cambridge academic who had politicised her research on the Occupation of the Channel Islands in order to promote her own agenda. What follows is a very similar story, which shows the disturbing extent to which readers of popular history are being let down by a publishing industry that doesn't appear to give a hoot for niceties such as historical accuracy, and, er, the truth.

Last week, The Bookseller ran a story that announced that Pan Macmillan, after a bidding war with Penguin, had acquired the rights to a book called The Spy Who Loved, by one Clare Mulley. According to the report, the book will tell the story of Christine Granville, who was 'the inspiration for Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and reputed to be Winston Churchill's favourite spy'. Furthermore, Granville was the 'first woman to work as a British secret agent in the Second World War'. All great stuff, you might think, and it's hardly surprising that Georgina Morley, Pan Macmillan's editorial director, described the book as "a wonderful tale of a fascinating, difficult and enormously courageous woman, whose lovelife was every bit as colourful as her heroic acts of espionage".

The website of Clare Mulley's agent, Andrew Lownie, was no less gushing. Granville, it reported, was in fact 'Britain's first WW2 secret agent', 'the inspiration for Vesper Lynd', and it even included a glowing quote attributed to Ian Fleming: "She literally shines with all the qualities and splendours of a fictitious character".

It's easy to see why Pan Macmillan and Penguin were so keen to buy the book.

World War Two? Check.

Spies? Check.

Female WW2 spy? Check.

Beautiful female WW2 spy? Check.

Beautiful female WW2 spy who had an affair with Ian Fleming? Check.

Beautiful female WW2 spy who had an affair with Ian Fleming and was basis of the first James Bond girl? Check.

And so on. It's absolutely clear that The Spy Who Loved, with its deliberately Bondesque title, has just about everything a publisher wants. A micro-history of the war, a beautiful woman, and most crucially of all, that link with James Bond, with the implied licence to print money.

Perhaps predictably, it's all too good to be true. What makes matters worse, is that both Andrew Lownie and Clare Mulley were on very iffy grounds with their claims about Granville and must have known it – and yet they still went ahead to promote it in this way.

Last year, Ron Nowicki, the founder of the San Francisco Review of Books, who has written an unpublished biography of Christine Granville, heard about the project in Andrew Lownie's newsletter. There, Lownie revealed that Mulley's biography was being submitted to publishers. Nowicki wrote to Lownie via his website, and told the agent that much of what was claimed about Granville in the synopsis on his site was impossible to substantiate. Although Lownie did not reply, Nowicki received a Facebook request shortly afterwards from none other than Clare Mulley.

A frustrated Nowicki then went on Amazon, and wrote a review of a previous biography of Granville, in which Nowicki revealed that so much of the Granville story is myth, and he specifically showed that there was no evidence to link Granville with Ian Fleming, let alone Winston Churchill. It is also worth noting that the doubts about the affair have been contained on Granville's Wikipedia page since at least August 2009.

Lownie and Mulley went ahead and sold the book with a proposal that made these exciting but unverified claims for Granville. Without them, the story of Granville, although fascinating, would be unlikely to get publishers salivating in quite the same way without the Bond and Churchill connections. There have, after all, been many books about female SOE agents – including Madeleine Masson's full-length biography of Granville published in 1975, and reissued in 2005.

Now step foward my friend Jeremy Duns, who caught wind of the Mulley project last week, and found his eyebrows hitting the ceiling. There are few people in the world who know more about Ian Fleming than Duns, and he is author of an excellent essay that shows how the link between Fleming and Granville was entirely concocted by Donald McCormick in his 1993 book, 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming. Duns convincingly shows that McCormick invented not only the affair between Granville and Fleming, but also manufactured the notion that she was the inspiration for Vesper Lynd.

Earlier this week, Jeremy Duns helpfully emailed his essay to Clare Mulley, and explained that there were huge problems with the claims that she was making in her book. However, as the parent of three children and with it being half-term, Mulley told Duns that she was too busy to deal with him. But she was not too busy to contact Andrew Lownie, who then did something very striking – he changed his website.

All references to Granville being Churchill's favourite agent were deleted, and Granville was now only 'reputedly' the inspiration for Vesper Lynd. Furthermore, the Fleming quote was dropped entirely. These changes are highly illustrative of the lack of confidence both Lownie and Mulley have for what they claimed – claims that helped secure them a no doubt meaty five-figure advance.

Yesterday morning, I spoke to Andrew Lownie, and I asked him why they had made the changes. At first, Lownie said that Mulley was 'holding back new material', but when I enquired as to why he felt the need to add the word 'reputedly', if indeed Mulley did have new material to support her claims, I received no direct reply.

Eventually, Lownie was candid. "We felt it was wrong," he told me, "and that we should rein back on the links with Vesper Lynd if that was going to be the focus of the book."

Wow. So here was one of London's top agents admitting that he had sold a book on the basis of something that was unsubstantiated. He did not say whether he received the email that Ron Nowicki sent before the sale.

I then asked him whether he was going to let Pan Macmillan know that he was 'reining back the links' with Vesper Lynd, but he told me that the changes had 'only happened yesterday'. He ended the phone call by suggesting that Clare Mulley should contact me, which she has so far failed to do. Pan Macmillan now need to ask themselves whether the book they have bought in good faith and on trust is in fact what they were promised.

So far, Pan Macmillan are standing by their new purchase, and have issued the following: "Macmillan is delighted to have acquired Clare Mulley's book about Christine Granville's life story. When it is written, the book will certainly address the Fleming story – which forms only a passing anecdote in Christine's eventful life – but first and foremost it promises to be a first-rate book of narrative history about one of the Second World War's most extraordinary characters."

Lownie also states that "no one has tried to mislead anyone", and the book was sold on a "47-page proposal which states clearly how Clare intends to explore the story around Fleming – it is only a passing feature in the book and merits only a few lines in the proposal".

The idea that the 'Fleming story' is only a 'passing anecdote' or 'a passing feature' is puzzling, especially as the title is called The Spy Who Loved, and much has been made of the 'Fleming story' in Pan Macmillan's press release to The Bookseller and indeed, on Lownie's own website. Unsurprisingly, neither Pan Macmillan nor Lownie described the relationship as 'a passing anecdote' in any publicity, and I am delighted that Pan Macmillan have now publicly highlighted the insignificance of the 'Fleming story' – such as it is. It will be interesting to see if they replicate such statements upon publication. Besides, if the Fleming anecdote is a 'passing feature' – and let's not forget that there's not even any proof for it – why not go the whole hog and just get rid of the Fleming-inspired title?

The sad fact is that such a tale is by no means atypical. Agents have to earn a living, and some will make enormous claims for books that they privately know are pure drek. Some publishers play along with it as well, and are happy to buy guff if it ticks all the right boxes. Once again, the victim is you. There is too much Junk History around, and this is just one of the ways in which it is created. Take care with what you buy.